NOTE: Since the June 23, 2009 opening, all of these documents have been consolidated and are available for research at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California. The locations given below indicate where the documents were at the time of the opening.

Background

On June 23, 2009, the Nixon Library opened additional materials from the Nixon Presidential Materials. Below are scans of 41 documents that represent the variety of subjects and wealth of historical information included in this new release.

The documents are from file segments for the White House Special Files, Staff Member & Office Files; White House Central Files, Staff Member & Office Files; and the National Security Council File series, including the Henry A. Kissinger Telephone Conversation Transcripts (Telcons).

Please visit the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, or College Park, Maryland (as indicated for each collection below), to research all of the documents.

The documents have been numbered on our website and this brief overview will refer to individual documents by those numbers.

The release includes significant material on the formulation of the Nixon administration’s domestic policy. Some of the scanned documents shed light on administration policy toward the Clean Air Act (4, 7), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (5), Campaign Finance Reform (1), Title IX of the Education Act (which outlawed sex discrimination in higher education) (9), and President Nixon’s support for the Equal Rights Amendment (2, 3). Chief domestic advisor Kenneth Cole’s notes shed additional light on White House discussions during the 1973 standoff with Native Americans at Wounded Knee (5), on President Nixon’s analysis of the Middle East and the American role in that region in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War (10), the circumstances surrounding the firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in October 1973 and of the reaction of prominent figures, such as California Governor Ronald Reagan, to what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre (6, 11). A detailed memorandum from Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1970 offers some of the intellectual underpinnings of White House domestic politics in that era (35) and a 1971 memorandum from Charles Colson about Peter Brennan outlines a strategy for increasing support among labor unions (26).

Also included among the newly available domestic policy documents are materials about the 1971 political investigation of the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 37, 41); about the White House’s 1969 investigation of Senator Edward M. Kennedy (33); about the strategy for handling Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri (34); on activities against the Brookings Institution in 1971 (24, 37); and about the Radford Affair, the December 1971 White House investigation of leaks to journalist Jack Anderson, and on efforts to inject the issue of homosexuality into that investigation (21, 22).

The new releases include over 5,000 pages of formerly classified materials released through the Mandatory Review process. Representing these materials is a memorandum of conversation involving Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew (18) that illustrates the Nixon Administration’s geo-political strategy in Asia in the wake of the opening to China. A memorandum of a meeting between President Nixon and Prime Minister Edward Heath the United Kingdom provides insight on alliance politics and detente with the Soviet Union (16). Also included is the transcript of an April 1970 telephone conversation between President Nixon and Senator John Stennis of Mississippi on the eve of the U.S.-South Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia (20). Finally, a December 1970 letter from Prime Minister Golda Meir (14) and a National Security Council brief on US policy toward nuclear non-proliferation in the Middle East (13) provide information on the history of US-Israeli relations.